Enrollment booms; graduation rates don't

Tuesday

Nov 19, 2013 at 10:45 PM

As Stark State College's enrollment has jumped, the school has had to work harder to meet students' needs — and is learning there might be better ways to measure student success in addition to just looking at degree completion.

Alison Matas CantonRep.com staff writer @amatasREP

In the past decade, enrollment at Stark State College has nearly tripled.

But traditional graduation rates have remained relatively flat — between about 7 percent and 15 percent, depending on how many years it takes students to earn an associate's degree.

The nature of community colleges presents inherent challenges to student retention and completion, and the growth Stark State College has experienced posed new complications. Community college officials across Ohio, however, say standard two-year degree completion isn't the best way to gauge student performance.

"Our sector really serves a population of students that historically hasn't been counted in the graduation rates," said Lada Gibson-Shreve, provost and chief academic officer at Stark State College.

The college is exploring new barometers for achievement as it participates in a national research project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that is designed to increase retention and graduation rates at community colleges nationally.

"Community colleges across the country are wrestling with how to increase graduation, and part of the challenge is finding accurate measures of success," said Kathleen Cleary, project manager for Ohio and associate provost for student completion at Sinclair Community College.

MEASURING GRADUATION AND RETENTION

There is some difficulty in examining retention and graduation data for community colleges because the national reporting method for universities focuses on first-year, full-time students, which isn't the primary demographic for community colleges.

The average community college student in Ohio is 28 years old and is attending school part-time, said Karen Rafinski, interim president of the Ohio Association of Community Colleges. So most community colleges in the state typically show a graduation rate of about 6 percent to 12 percent, she said, but that number only measures a handful of students.

During an April meeting with a Stark State's Board of Trustees, President Para Jones and Director of Institutional Research and Planning Peter Trumpower gave a presentation about the first-time, full-time student data for the college. They said while it represented a subset of the student body, it could be generalized to the larger population.

The highlights, according to the meeting minutes, included that:

The three-year graduation rate sank 75 percent from the class that started in 2003 to the class that started in 2009The number of graduates from each class had declined seven years in a rowThe number of graduates had increased at less than half the rate of enrollment growthJones and Trumpower, in their report, said the statistics weren't a shock because student success was suffering nationally as a result of across-the-board enrollment leaps, according to meeting minutes.

ENROLLMENT

At Stark State, enrollment jumped from 5,846 in 2003 to 15,252 in 2012, according to fall head-count data from the Ohio Board of Regents.

Several officials said the recession triggered growth nationally, as people went back to school when jobs dried up.

Gibson-Shreve said the college was faced with reacting to the growth, rather than planning for it ahead of time. In her previous role as the dean of liberal arts, she once had to add 23 courses in a day to make sure there were enough offerings to meet the needs of all the students.

Gibson-Shreve said the grant program, in part, will help the college learn to better manage enrollment.

'TRYING TO MEASURE TRUE SUCCESS'

Cleary said the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation project is supposed to help community colleges increase student success — which means colleges first need to understand how to determine whether a student has been successful.

She said administrators know there are three general types of community college students: Those looking to earn a two-year degree, those intending to complete one or two years at community college and transfer to a four-year university, and those trying to earn a certificate or learn a skill that will help them in their current professions.

There's a lack of agreement about what success is, Cleary said. Some students transfer after one year to a four-year university to pursue a bachelor's degree. Others complete most of an associate's degree and are offered a job before graduating — meaning they didn't finish school but still found employment because of the skills they acquired in college.

Community colleges in Ohio are working to develop a method they can use to figure out whether students are reaching their goals when they leave school. No data is available yet.

"It's a complicated way of trying to measure true success," Cleary said.